Working smarter to deliver a better mental health service

Mental health service provider Pneuma Healthcare has grown rapidly since spinning out from Ulster University in May 2022. The company now employs 18 psychological wellbeing practitioners who deliver online and remote support to clients of Greater Manchester NHS Trust and the Six Degrees social enterprise which provides mental health and bereavement services to the Salford and Greater Manchester area.

“We expect to have 25 or 26 staff by October,” says chief executive and founder Dr Colin Gorman. “Over the next month we have two projects starting that we are excited about. They are both in Ireland. In the first we will have three staff piloting the service for the Northern Health and Social Care Trust to see how it works here. The other is the cross-Border adolescent mental health project.”

The company has its genesis in Gorman’s own observations of mental health services as a lecturer in clinical psychology at Ulster University. Lengthening waiting lists in under-resourced mental health services were having a severe impact on people’s lives and there was no sign of improvement.

On the other hand, there is no shortage of qualified people to provide the required care. Every year up to 65 psychology MScs are trained to high standards in Northern Ireland alone.

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“We had the graduates but they weren’t able to get jobs,” Gorman explains. “And there was a need for greater mental health service provision at the same time. It was a question of joining the dots.”

Joining those dots led him to set up Pneuma Healthcare to help solve the problem. The idea of starting a company came about through a conversation with Ulster University start-up manager Fergus Begley in 2021.

“I probably spent 14 months speaking to people in Ulster about business and finance and marketing and so on,” says Gorman. “They were able to advise on aspects of starting a business that I hadn’t even thought of. All that good work has paid off over the past 14 or 15 months. The company has actually been two or three years in the making.”

The Pneuma approach differs from the standard model of one hour of counselling once a week over 12 or 16 weeks. Instead, people access support at an early stage by having eight sessions of 35 minutes by phone or video calls. This aids in getting to hard-to-reach people who are busy working or studying, with sessions being arranged for times that suit them.

The timing was propitious, as pandemic restrictions led to the widespread adoption of virtual and remote healthcare provision. Greater Manchester NHS Trust expressed interest immediately on being contacted by Gorman and agreed a contract worth £400,000 before the company was even established.

I believe there will never be enough mental health services to meet people’s needs. We need more people but we also need to work smarter

—  Dr Colin Gorman

“The plan was to get it right, make sure it’s done safely and then build out,” says Gorman. “Three people started on the contract in May 2022. That grew to five or six over the summer and then another two in the new year.

“Since then, we’ve won a couple of new contracts with them and now have 15 staff working full time with the trust in three of the areas they cover. They are now talking about setting up a specialist service to manage even more referrals. They also put us in contact with Six Degrees and we started working with them at the end of July.”

The company makes extensive use of technology and data to continuously improve service effectiveness. Every service provided to every client is assessed with data points for every intervention recorded. This enables the service to be modified in order to suit the needs of individual clients.

“We employ evidence-based practices,” Gorman explains. “We use technology to improve efficiency. I believe there will never be enough mental health services to meet people’s needs. We need more people but we also need to work smarter and embrace technology to reach more people with less resources.”

Indeed, technology is playing a central role in the cross-Border project. “It will use digital interventions such as apps and so on to reach more people. Adolescents don’t really want to talk to an adult in a chair about their mental health issues. Hopefully it will help to address issues to do with self-esteem, low mood, anxiety and so on.”

The support provided by Ulster University has been critically important to the company’s success to date, Gorman believes.

“We have grown very quickly since the first Manchester contract, and we have had to manage that growth from one contract to a number of contracts. We are still based within Ulster University. They support us with physical space and IT support. Fergus Begley sits on our board and gives us valuable guidance based on his experience with spin-out companies.”

The financial support given by Ulster has also been important. “As we started to grow, we realised that things don’t always go as smoothly as you hope,” says Gorman. “Payments can be delayed by something as simple as an individual being off sick or on holiday. The financial buffer of the €70,000 convertible loan note from Ulster has helped keep us in business.

“From the outset, they were able to advise on aspects we hadn’t even thought of. They also linked us in with Martin Bell who is a business consultant and now on the board. He has given us the benefit of his years of experience in health and technology. If I had gone ahead without the support from Ulster, we wouldn’t be where we are now.”

Looking ahead, Gorman says the next phase will be one of consolidation. “We need to pause for breath. We have moved quickly from being a small to a medium-sized enterprise and we need to adjust to that.”